mama, here, and the edges of spring

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014; 12:07 p.m.

It’s bright today. I squint my eyes to block out the sun as I walk in to Schenley.

If my mom were here, she’d ask: “Did you wear face moisturizer with SPF?”

She’d tell me: “Don’t forget your sunglasses.”

She’d say: “Go have fun. Stop worrying about me.”

Her birthday was on Saturday. She would have turned fifty-six.

I celebrated in an underground cabaret bar off Pike Place Market in Seattle. 

My best friend Natalie, who I met in college, was at the AWP conference with me. We toasted with Happy Hour Prosecco. We remembered days we’d had together with Mom. I told Nat how Mom called the people and animals she loved “Sweet Petunia”. I told her mom loved eggplant parmesan. I told her how I held mom’s small-getting-smaller body one morning and told her to “shut up.” We were in the garage of the last home we shared together. She had been apologizing at the end of the summer as I was about to get in my car and drive to North Carolina for my final year of college. She’d said,  “I’m sorry.” For not going out to lunch or to the card store or on walks with me when I’d asked her to on warm summer afternoons. She was too tired to go. The cancer was all-claws-out. She only ever tried to give me what I wanted. I had to let her know she hadn’t disappointed me. The chemotherapy started a month later. That day in the garage was the last time I saw her with all of her hair.

I haven’t really written about my mom yet on this nature blog. Somehow, being in this place has kept me in this place, in the physical world. But it’s an anomaly. My mother shows up in almost every other thing I write. I can’t not write about her. It’s the only thing coming out of me. I see so much of the world through my loss of her. But it scares me a little. What if I’m incapable of ever writing not about her? What if I can't write outside of this loss? I have been pushing myself to try. Natalie shared a quote with me last week: “Don’t let your struggle become your identity.” It's a quote from the musician Ralston Bowles. I try to keep this in mind about my writing.

Last night, the heat broke in our house. I had just gotten home from Seattle after two cancelled flights, a night in an airport hotel room, a 5:55 a.m. take-off time, and an almost-missed connection. I can still feel in my thighs the burn of the sprint from Houston Gate C-30 to C-33. (Give me a break, I hadn’t worked out all week.) I made it to the gate as they were saying my name on the intercom. They closed the door shut behind me.

And then it was 55-degrees in my house and the landlord sent a guy named Emerson. He fixed the problem. It was the sensors. While we waited to make sure the heat would stay on, Emerson compared Kyle’s and my weights to Apacha’s.

“He’s ninety-five pounds? He’s almost as much as you. You’re one hundred twenty.”

Thanks, Emerson.

He asked us if we make parties and take beer. He asked us if we wanted to order a pizza. We’d just eaten.

He saw a couple extra filters in our basement, which my dad picked up for us last time he was here. Emerson asked if he could buy one from us—he had a job in the morning for which he needed one. He didn’t want to go to Home Depot first if he didn’t have to. We gave it to him for free and then it was 11:00 p.m. and he was gone. My travel day was finally over when I fell asleep an hour later.

Exhausted, with so much to do after the conference, I never would have carved out time by myself to come sit here. But I need it. And I am so thankful for this blog project right now to be sitting on my rock, quiet, at peace, outside.

I saw a chipmunk on my way in. He’s the first mammal, aside from a couple squirrels and fellow humans, that I’ve seen since coming here. I saw him go into his hole, saw him come back out and look at me. 

He scurried away and wedged himself between two rocks but continued to look at me, head down, paws flat. 

He reminded me of my Chihuahua, Tink. I know if I don’t make a life out of working with animals I will never be fully happy.

I saw more animal tracks in the snow, but I can't quite identify them. Rabbits, perhaps? 

The new snow covers the ice on the trails and so I could walk today instead of skate. I feel like I have been in motion for ages. I go to Florida next week to visit my grandmother, my mom’s mom. I will be on the move again, more planes, more landscape. The beach has never sounded so good. Just as I am thinking of this, I come under the bridge, which is dripping water. The effect on the snow looks like sand, wet and patterned from the tide under the dimming sun, darkened by the shadows of the sky.

 I love when such opposite ideas remind me of each other. Jonny and I were talking about this in Seattle and he mentioned it in his last blog post—a hand so cold it burns, a face so beautiful it makes you sad.

As I walk, I look down and see this rock.

It reminds me of the rock collection my aunt brought me back from Pompeii when I was younger. The box held a sample of nine rocks from the area near the volcano. A photograph of Mt. Vesuvius was taped onto the inside flap of the box. I used to sit on the Oriental rug in our living room and handle the rocks for hours, it seemed. I ran my fingers over the surfaces—smooth, dark obsidian; a pale yellow rock that felt like powder; an electric blue one made of small reflective crystals. I brought them to my nose and smelled the sulfur, heat, and silt. The graphite-looking one rubbed off dark onto my fingertips. The porous ones left a tingle outlined in dust on my soft pads. At one point growing up, I wanted to be a geologist. Fitting, perhaps, that I have found a huge rock to settle into as I write for this project.

When I got to my rock, there was a strange piece of metal on it and a mark from what looked like a butt that was not my own. 

I was a little surprised, disappointed even. I hadn’t thought about someone sharing my rock with me (back to that misplaced, perhaps, ownership thing). What if I got here one day and someone was already sitting here? What would I do? I used the metal scrap to wipe away the snow and began to write.

I have seen about six runners or walkers today in the forest. I think about Ryan’s question of how we react to people we see writing in public places. I wonder what these runners think of me sitting here, scribbling away, feet dangling off the rock, my green backpack tucked next to me. Sometimes I look up and we make eye contact. Sometimes, we smile. Mostly, we are lost in our elements, though, and don’t need each other just then.

This is the tree I will investigate this week. I have a feeling it may be easier to identify than my first tree.

I hear the stream, but it is faint, not fully rushing, slowed down again by cold. I hear a plane and a rhythmic birdcall. The bridges, as always, are frozen in time. The forest has settled into itself. The anticipation of change looks good on it.

But the sun is out and spring is not completely absent like it has been for so much of the winter. Right when I got to Schenley, I saw movement in a holly tree.

I looked in and saw a beautiful, plump robin. She moved up a branch, a bit farther away from me, and we looked at each other. I thought about her spring, how it seems to be beginning now, how the worms will someday soon be aplenty. How, if we are lucky, we may be seeing gorgeous blue eggs in the coming weeks, precious talismans of hope, sweet vessels of light.

Maggie